Singing kites are old. China has bowed strings, Japan has the unari, Vietnam has flutes, Bermuda has hummers — different builds, one idea: hang the noisemaker aloft and let the kite be the body the wind animates, with the hummer as its throat. Firat Erdim, trained as an architect, has spent since 2018 moving that throat back down to earth. In Kite Choir, nothing sounds in the sky; the instrument is the reel and the entire tow line. On 7 July 2026, Warm Gospel released Seyðisfjörður Soundings, a vinyl LP with one continuous track per side, recorded during a two-month residency at HEIMA in Seyðisfjörður, a fjord town on Iceland's east coast. Most mornings he tuned the instruments, packed the kites and the recording gear, and walked out along the fjord toward the sea, performing a "sounding" wherever the wind turned favorable.

The record was made with what he calls an electric "hurdy-gurdy reel," which has nothing to do with an actual hurdy-gurdy except that it involves a hand-cranked wheel and produces long drones. The tow line is nylon monofilament coated in rosin, slightly tacky. As the kite is reeled in and out, that line bows a rank of four to six tuned strings arranged low to high, reel toward sky. The strings are played open — no fingering — and how many of them sound depends on the angle you hold the instrument at relative to the kite. That is the controllable half. The other half: because of vortex-induced vibration, every string, including the tow line itself, is already singing in the wind whether or not anything bows it. And the tow line is continuously changing length, tension and geometry as it pays out, so its own voice can slide from a soft cooing to a thin, fiendish wail. The first track on Side A is largely that purely wind-driven sound.

Here is the part that matters structurally: the bow and the bowed string are the same line. There is no way to tune the controllable channel independently of the uncontrollable one; touch either and you have touched both. Nearly every instrument ever built is designed the other way around — a piano is a machine for making intention and sound coincide, and the remainder is squeezed down as far as engineering allows. Kite Choir inserts the atmosphere into the middle of the causal chain and then refuses to remove it. Erdim's own framing is exact: these instruments sit between two poles, "neither allowing the operator a sense of autonomous expression nor letting them off the hook with a passive listening device." Both poles are already-construct. Romantic authorship is a complete and finished vocabulary. So is the Cageian lineage of chance, field recording and deep listening — the art world has been digesting it for seventy years. What he occupies is the seam between two finished constructs, and the seam has no name not because it is obscure but because it does not reduce to either side.

One further detail, easy to skim past as engineering: the wind's contribution is not random. Vortex-induced vibration always produces overtones of whatever each string is tuned to. Which means the tuning you chose determines the shape of the part you cannot control. The remainder is not noise — it is what the construct generates and then cannot contain. It does not float outside the system independently; the system produces it, the system's boundary excludes it, and from outside it turns around and bears load. Erdim notes that the constantly vibrating tow line "acquires a thickness," and that thickness changes how it functions as a bow: the excluded part comes back and rewrites the controlling part. That is the step in the chisel-construct cycle most often skipped — the same cut that draws the boundary is what generates the overflow, and the overflow becomes the purchase for the next cut.

The score, by the electroacoustic composer Paula Matthusen, is printed as a deck of playing cards (designed and fabricated by Kaitlin McCoy), with four sets of instructions contingent on aeolian, climatic, temporal and what he calls "fuzzy" conditions. Erdim reports that over the years the most insightful instructions have turned out to be the ones that dispense with kites and instruments altogether — usually drawn because the weather refused. A formal system whose highest-yield output falls outside its own definition of output is the remainder in its purest form. The phrase "weather permitting" works the same way: it normally lives at the bottom of an invitation as a disclaimer, the sediment of a calendar. He turns it over and makes it the governing principle — it "usually indicates limitation, but it can also function as license." Sediment promoted to first premise.

Why see it now rather than later: the naming has started but has not closed. "Aeolian," "more-than-human agency," "attunement," "weathering" — this vocabulary has hardened fast over the last few years, the words are stocked, the slot is cleared. The moment Kite Choir is fully filed under sound art / eco-acoustics / human–nonhuman collaboration, its remainder is spent, and what is left is a very beautiful already-construct: repeatable, teachable, fundable. It is not there yet. The project began in 2018, excerpts of the Iceland soundings have been circulating since 2019, and the record only appeared in July 2026 — eight years of the thing existing without a finished name, and that gap is itself the remainder. Press a vinyl, let reviews accumulate, and the naming begins. The last line may be the hardest to absorb: "the place is the actual body of a Kite Choir instrument." The cliffs and the sea fog comb the wind into that particular shape; the instrument is deliberately built incomplete and closes its circuit only on something outside itself. Most formalizations conceal their dependence on the outside. This one puts it on the front.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics